The calla lilies are in bloom again...

At the beginning of last week's film, Ellen Wagstaff Arden has been lost at sea (missing; presumed dead) while engaged as the photographer for an anthropological expedition to Indo-China.

While that back-story was obviously developed to establish the premise of the entire film (that she returns after a long absence to find her husband re-married) it is, I think, very notable that her character is shown to have a successful career. Irrespective of the fact that she is supposed to be married with two young children, the (husband-and-wife) writers of My Favorite Wife saw no conflict in depicting a female character who had a life and a vocation that extended beyond her identity as merely wife and mother.

Women in the 1930s were generally seen as people. They were allowed to have ambitions and aspirations that extended beyond "finding a man" and "becoming a mother". It was in the post-war years that mainstream society explicitly attempted to re-define womanhood as something exclusively domestic. 

When My Favorite Wife was re-made (very badly) as a vehicle for Doris Day in 1963, the new writers very pointedly changed the circumstances of her disappearance. Irene Dunn's character in the original might have been pursuing her career as a photographer, but Doris Day in the remake was simply accompanying her husband on his business trip (like the dutiful little wife she presumably is). It was apparently inconceivable to show a married woman with an actual career in the 1960s.

What a terrible, awful movie...

But Hollywood movies of the 1930s were practically bursting with ambitious, career-minded women, and our next film is very much a celebration of that.

When I embarked on this current sub-season of Depression/Comedies I promised Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers in various combinations.

We have already seen Cary Grant paired with Katharine Hepburn (and a leopard or two) and we will be seeing Cary Grant with Ginger Rogers in a few weeks. But our next offering marks the only occasion in which Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers appeared together onscreen.

Stage Door was released in 1937 and follows the trials and tribulations of a group of young women who share accommodations at a theatrical boarding house in New York and dream of careers in the theatre. 

The film was adapted from a highly successful Broadway play, but the screenplay is so radically different from the original stage version that the producers wondered if the finished film should be called "Screen Door".

Whatever you choose to call it, Stage Door is the consummate Depression-era comedy. Featuring razor-sharp dialogue and top-notch performances by some of the leading actresses of the generation, the film successfully captures the grind and the (often brutal) uphill struggle women face as they pursue a career in show-business in the 1930s.

Director Gregory La Cava (who also directed Ginger Rogers in Fifth Avenue Girl, which I screened last month) studied the mannerisms and speech patterns of each of the actresses in the production, and further allowed them to improvise much of their own dialogue. This is why so many of the characters (even the relatively minor ones) seem remarkably well-defined.

The film also features early appearances (very early in one case) of a few notable names who would go on to become heavyweights in the entertainment world.

Lucille Ball (long before she became the most famous face on television) plays Ginger Rogers' friend Judy;

...and Rogers' dancing partner is played by Ann Miller, who would go on to become one of Hollywood's most iconic dancing stars. 

Miller was young when she appeared in Stage Door, but no one at the time suspected just how young she actually was. She had lied about her age, so no one on the set realised that she was actually 14 when the film was made.

Like many films released during the era of the Production Code, Stage Door also alludes to some very dark aspects of society without actually referring to them outright. It makes no attempt to gloss over the hardships and obstacles that women face when they try to pursue a career in the entertainment industry, and many plot elements deal with challenges that are just as relevant today as they were almost ninety years ago.

Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn never worked together again (and they were not close, by all accounts) but they make a formidable pairing here. Indeed, putting them together in a film had been something of a radical decision on the part of RKO Studios: Hepburn's last few films had not been especially well received (her major successes were still mostly in her future) while Ginger Rogers was going from strength to strength in the 1930s, and was considered one of the major movie stars of the era.

But the finished film remains one of the strongest "female-centric" films ever to come out of Hollywood - and not only of the Depression era.

We will screen Stage Door at 7.30 on Thursday, the 2nd of May at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.